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Robocabs Coming to Europe
Roland Piquepaille writes "Almost all of us can recall both good and poor memories of taxi rides when we arrived in a city we didn't know. This is why a short article from Spiegel Online, 'Bringing Robot Transportation to Europe,' caught my eye this morning. It briefly describes the European 'CityMobil' project which involves 28 partners in 10 countries at a cost of €40 million. This project plans to eliminate city drivers and three trial sites have already been selected. For example, in 2008, Terminal 5 in London's Heathrow airport will be connected to the car park by driverless electric cars along a 4-kilometer track. Read more for additional pictures and references about this project to make the roads in Europe's cities more efficient."
In Soviet Russia, car drives you!
"You're in a JohnnyCab!"
So you mean by 2008 we'll have reverted back to trollies and cable-cars? Perhaps people will even ride in electric vehicles that carry 30 or more people! Then everyone can get there for a tenth of the price! Oh wait, no that's a bus...
1) Take age old idea.
2) Do the same thing only with added benefit of key words.
3) Sell it as a new idea
4) Get fools to buy it.
5) PROFIT!!
Yeah, that's right, no "?????" step here.
I found a more insightful article that explains the advantage of this system over existing airport shuttle systems:
The difference for passengers will be not so much the journey time - which will be about four minutes - but how long they have to wait. Instead of huddling under a shelter for as long as 20 minutes as they currently do waiting for a bus, the pod will be at most a minute away.
Robots aren't very good drivers yet.
What we need are really cheap taxis that people can rent with a credit or debit card, drive a short distance, and pretty much just jump out and leave them. They need to be about as cheap as shopping carts - and even designed to fold up like shopping carts, so they can be racked conveniently in a compact space.
You'd probably rent the right to keep one at home over-night. You'd drive it a mile or two on surburban streets to a bus or lightrail terminal, where you'd rack it and get your "taxicard" back. Ride the transit, get off within a mile or two of where you need to be. Grab another taxi-cart, insert your taxicard, drive to your final destination. Rack it up with dozens or hundreds of others in the taxicart stall, and get your taxicard back again.
Reverse that, when going home. Each Taxicart stand would have extra taxicarts, and a computer system would note when a stand runs out completely, so that a couple of extras could quickly be delivered there. In the rare case that you arrive somewhere with an empty taxicart rack, you can punch a button to have one delivered, and get a credit for your inconvenience of having to wait.
The taxicart would be all electric, with maybe a 15 mile range, probably about 25mph maximum speed. It would re-charge while racked up. It'd also have a small tank of water - in the summer that'd be frozen (while on the rack) to provide maybe half an hour's air conditioning. In the winter, it'd be heated, for about the same duration of heat.
It'd be computer tracked with wireless and GPS - so the central computer could track units that get stalled. If you need to go somewhere without a rack, and leave the cart there, you could punch a button and pay to have it picked up - trucks would drive around just for that purpose - and again get your taxicard back. It'd have a plug too, so you could charge it up if necessary.